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Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

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Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#421

Post by smsm42 »

Bud wrote: post #104
jerf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, trying to solve this problem by creating a definition of "misinformation" sufficiently precise to act on it for all possible articles, then trying to remove it somehow is probably an AI-complete problem. If it's not AI-complete it's probably just plain an ill-formed question. That's before we ask questions about the biases that get embedded into the misinformation detector. This can't be fixed at Facebook scales…

There is no need to create a Grand Unified Theory of misinformation, here. This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles. It's not hard to figure out which online sources are pushing out most of the abjectly-bad propaganda, and de-rank them.

Pretty much all mainstream media outlets did, at some point, publish something that can be qualified as "bad propaganda" by at least some of the observers. Now, either you filter out pretty much all the internet except maybe for bare statistics, numbers, math, etc., or you say "well, these guys are not as bad as those guys, because obviously being completely wrong about X much worse than being slightly less than right about Y", at which point you are just implementing your own biases.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#422

Post by danblick »

Neil Postman argued in "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (1985) that entertainment had become the "supra-ideology of all discourse on television". Good television is entertaining while bad television is not, so we learn to judge all content on television based on its entertainment value.

"Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images."

I think Postman's comments are extremely relevant today (30 years after 1985) except that now they would apply to the Facebook news feed. (The quote about 'exchanging images' is now literally true.) The role of "news as entertainment" does a lot to explain the Trump's emergence as a candidate in the first place (he got a lot of coverage early on because of his outlandishness).

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#423

Post by smsm42 »

ethbro wrote: post #180
jerf wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This problem isn't that hard. You filter this stuff and rank it by its SOURCE, not by the content of individual articles." I don't think reifying ad hominem into code is the solution to the problem. Of course, if you don't mind a rare few false positives here and there on articles, I've got your filter right here: def source_is_trustworthy(source): return False Remember as you sit here thinking through your exceptio…

I don't think you're ever going to detect truth correctly, but you can absolutely detect falsehood. Compare "{Candidate} up over 5000% in polls" vs "{Candidate} up over 15% in polls". Baby steps. PageRank wasn't built in a day.

PageRank is also not unbiased, it has been played before many times and pure PageRank would be pretty easy to play - that's why Google keeps tweaking it years after it was invented. And still SEO industry exists. Now, SEOs just compete on being on the first page, not claiming something as grandiose as "truth" - add that to the mix, and all the biases there are, and you get pretty much hopeless task. And of course you get under a constant stream of criticism, and maybe also government regulation - it's one thing to just produce search results (even that is controversial, remember "right to forget"?), it's another thing to claim being able to "detect falsehood" - that's very sure a way to get sued and for the government to get involved.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#424

Post by mmel »

doomlaser wrote: post #239
linkregister wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said, NYT performed some significant investigative reporting. Though Gawker broke the Clinton private email server story, the New York Times vastly expanded the investigation and brought the story into the mainstream. The statement that the entire media system missed the election is an exaggeration. One function of the NYT, the election prediction section, failed. It shouldn't reflect on the various investigativ…

I would recommend reading this commentary, from the political director of CBS News, today: "The mood in the Washington press corps is bleak, and deservedly so. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, with a few exceptions, we were all tacitly or explicitly #WithHer, which has led to a certain anguish in the face of Donald Trump’s victory. More than that and more importantly, we also missed the story, after ha…

I'm frankly amazed that was published at CBS and not some pseudonymous post on medium.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#425

Post by knz »

tomp wrote: post #360
knz wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikileaks has it's own issues - the suggestions of Russian influence, the timing of their data releases, questions about Assages political bias against the US/Clintons etc. "People need to do their own research if they want to form conclusions not just little to prepackaged conclusions." - I could not agree more.

Would you rather that Wikileaks kept the information for itself? Wouldn't that be just as much of an influence on the election?

Personally I think they should just leak it all rather than controlling the flow to suit their political agenda.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#427

Post by piotrjurkiewicz »

duaneb wrote: post #53
Zikes wrote: post #24

Good luck with that. Reddit's failed at it. Twitter's failed at it. It's almost always bundled with some sort of hate speech or political rhetoric that triggers swaths of people when they feel like they're being silenced. There probably is no right way to do it.

I tend to agree—I think that the more we get upset by these sorts of behaviors, the more it encourages them. "Don't feed the trolls" is really the only thing that works, and it's a pretty miserable experience to have nothing you can do about harassment. Which isn't to say I disapprove of reddit, twitter et al removing hate speech; just that it's a very late and reactive solution to a problem that seems inherent in so…

> hate speech

On many subreddits, being in opposition to illegal massive immigration is being considered as a 'hate speech' and is a reason for ban.

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#429

Post by emodendroket »

return0 wrote: post #279
squozzer wrote: post #165

A humble question -- Had Hillary won, would this post even be on HN?

No. And facebook does not pretend it 's not pro-Hillary (its CEO endorsed her). That doesn't mean the discussion is not warranted. In fact it's long overdue. Facebook is now a medium like the rest, it needs to be regulated like the press imho.

"Regulated like the press?" What the hell does that mean?

Re: Facebook admits it must do more to stop the spread of misinformation

#430

Post by zxcvvcxz »

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is the voting system. I think the voting system ruins online discourse.

Let me explain. Within my own social media and online forum bubbles, there are a certain set of norms and beliefs that are easy to express.

But should I express the 'wrong' beliefs in the 'wrong' forum, I simply get downvoted to oblivion. And then people don't see what I have to say. Look what happens here on Hacker News, my comments will literally start faaaaading awaaaaaay!

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